writings about the time I became a sous chef in split, croatia
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As I’ve grown older and gained more control over my itineraries, I’ve found it increasingly necessary to consider the ethics of travel when planning a trip. When planning now, I often try to use my network of friends and/or mutual friends to guide where I visit. Something I often tell my peers when talking about my travels is that I try to visit a place as if I’m living there, even if only for a short time. That’s always much easier when I know someone on the ground there, even if we’ve only met once or twice. For me, it shifts the experience away from simply consuming a place and toward understanding how it’s actually lived in. I also think that however you live your life at home probably plays a part here, living with an awareness of the weight of consumerism in my daily life I think informs how I travel.
One trip that raised real questions for me about the ethics of travel was when I was working as a chef in a tapas restaurant in Split, Croatia, very much off the books. When I arrived for what was about a month-long stay, I knew I wanted to connect with the local community in a meaningful way. I emailed a restaurant in old town Split, and the chef, Jolanda, invited me to come have a coffee. We talked about travel, cooking, many things, then walked through the farmers market together and stopped by her butcher. I explained that I was hoping to work in a restaurant not to make money, but to better connect with the place I was visiting. She told me to come back the next afternoon. From then on, I was working six days a week, from two in the afternoon until midnight.
Working as a non-Croatian in Croatia is a complicated issue, and my coworkers found the situation a bit strange. We had great relationships, but they were insistent that I split tips with them or at least step outside for a fifteen-minute cigarette break, even though I didn’t smoke. At first I thought this was just restaurant industry camaraderie, but after speaking with the host of the apartment I was renting, I began to understand the deeper context. Croatia declared independence from Yugoslavia in 1991 and fought a four-year war. Under Yugoslavia’s socialist system, many people believed they could pursue the work they were passionate about and still expect a stable life. My host, for example, had dreamed of being a preschool teacher. The messy transition from socialism to a more capitalist economy in the 1990s brought high unemployment and corruption, making labor a sensitive subject. The mindset had shifted from a more socially oriented view of work to a take-what-you-can-get mentality. It was disrespectful for me not to take a smoke break, as I had deserved it with my work. I spoke openly about it with my head chef, Igor. It was, and still is, frowned upon to give work to non-citizens in Croatia. I wasn’t taking a wage, which eased some tension, but my presence in the kitchen still puzzled many locals. Jolanda also made it clear on my first day that if anyone from the Croatian government came in or started asking questions, I was to say I had simply stepped behind the counter to take photos of the kitchen, and then never show my face there again.
I still think that working in a restaurant abroad was a personal and beautiful way to get to know the place and its people, but it didn’t come without a necessary education. What felt to me like immersion and curiosity could register very differently to the locals. That gap between my intention and their lived reality was something I had to learn to sit with and take seriously.
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